Paul Newman (46 page)

The success of those roles—commercially and in the estimation of his peers and critics—was almost a bonus: he was so busy doing other things that his life’s profession could sometimes seem an afterthought in his absurdly busy schedule. But he had finally achieved the confidence, the skill, and the self-awareness to be not the golden boy, not the eternal lad, not the smirking prodigal, but a battle horse, a ruin, a man whose handsome aspect was actually—when you took a good look at it—composed of scars. The Eddie Felson of
The Color of Money
never had to talk about what happened to him a quarter-century earlier: he wore it on his face just as he did the oversize tinted shades that both he and the actor who portrayed him had come to favor. His out-bursts—like the scenes of anger in Newman’s other mature films—were moments not of petulance or frustration but of weary familiarity with the way things happen and a righteous welling against the seemingly ceaseless tide of bad people, bad faith, and bad luck. These were tough old guys: wiry, clever, hard. You wouldn’t bet against them in a fight—and you
really
wouldn’t want to be the one they were fighting.

B
UT SOON
even fighting would appear unseemly. Into his sixties and after, Newman mellowed into another sort of role. The fractures were
still there, the hard lessons, the failings, the wildness. But there would be a sense of comfortable acceptance of one’s fate, in such films as
Blaze, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Nobody’s Fool, Twilight, Where the Money Is, Road to Perdition, Empire Falls
, and even
Cars
, that had never been evident in him before. They would be slightly daft or soft, the characters he played in these films, even when clearly made of sterner stuff. They would have given up kicking at the world and moralizing about it and attempting to beat it or impose rules on it. They wouldn’t be settled or compliant, not really, and they could still bare their teeth when they needed to. But they would be wise and chagrined and apt to amusement—especially when confronted by the spectacles of younger men filled with the spit and vinegar that they themselves used to carry around.

Inklings of that newfound indulgence of heart appear the very moment Eddie Felson hears Vincent Lauria smash apart a rack of billiard balls, and it carries through, in various guises, in the relationship of General Leslie Groves to Robert Oppenheimer in
Fat Man and Little Boy
, in the feckless Donald Sullivan’s way of holding a town together in
Nobody’s Fool
, in the familial duet that a gangster and a killer play on a piano in
Road to Perdition
, in the grudging acceptance an old race car affords an upstart one in
Cars
, and in the beatific but flinty attitude of the Stage Manager in a live production of
Our Town.

He would, in short, spend the final decades of his career playing coots—but coots still capable of producing showers of wit and acid and pep and steel. And it would be hard to tell whether he enjoyed the role of the crusty old customer more on the screen or in life—because he reached a point, finally, when the two were almost inexorably intertwined. His life and his art had become synonymous. Lee Strasberg would have been amazed to see it.

I
N
1982 N
EWMAN
AND
J
OHN
F
RANKENHEIMER
NEARLY
MADE
A
movie about auto racing together, something to be called
Flat Out.
In fact, Newman had been looking for a chance to do another racing picture since
Winning
but hadn’t found the right material or the right moment. Similarly, he had long wanted to make a movie about the atomic age, specifically the specter of fear and the burden of responsibility that had been born with the Hiroshima blast. But he never stumbled upon the right way to handle it.

In 1988, though, a fascinating opportunity came his way. Roland Joffé, the director of
The Mission
and
The Killing Fields
, had written a script about the birth of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and, particularly, the struggles of ideology, power, and personality between J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb,” and General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and was then given the task of supervising the Manhattan Project and providing the military with a functional nuclear bomb. Joffé envisioned the creation of the devastating weapon as the result of tensions between the two men’s personalities and wills: the ramrod Groves with his urgent sense of a mission and the bohemian Oppenheimer, whose intellectual determination overwhelmed his fear of what might be unleashed if nuclear energy were weaponized.

Joffé had a deal at Paramount to make the film, named
Fat Man and Little Boy
after the bombs the United States dropped on Japan, and when he thought of Newman for the role of Groves, the studio agreed,
even when they learned that it would cost them $7 million to get him for his first film since
The Color of Money.
“I wanted a bulky personality,” Joffé said. “I wanted somebody who really counted.” Newman relished the challenge, beefing up a bit and wearing some padding to fill the role and twisting himself subtly into a character with personal and political beliefs almost entirely opposite his own. “It’s like a puritanical lady playing a whore,” he told a reporter. “There’s got to be something liberating about that.”

For the role of Oppenheimer, Joffé had set his mind on an unlikely choice: Dwight Schultz, the longtime stage actor best known for his role as a comical sidekick on TV’s
The A-Team.
Schultz looked a fair bit like Oppenheimer, though, and there was a certain poetic perversity in casting him, as it turned out that he was a political conservative. Joffé asked Newman to vet the actor, and one afternoon, sleepless from a red-eye flight from L.A. and nervous about auditioning for a screen icon, Schultz visited Newman’s Upper East Side apartment. “I guess he’s used to that reaction,” Schultz recalled. “He allayed my fears simply by putting me to work—by asking questions about the script, by telling me what he thought, and showing me what he had changed and what he was going to say to Roland.”

The film shot in the fall and winter in Tres Molinas, Mexico, about fifty miles from Durango, where a replica of Los Alamos was built. Joffé, who liked casting nonactors, had some actual prize-winning physicists playing members of Oppenheimer’s team. And he had a couple of rising young stars as well, including Laura Dern and John Cusack. Also in the cast was the actor Todd Field, who had signed on to the film partly for the chance it would afford him to work with Newman.

Amid these youngsters and scientists, Newman was something of an outsider. He spent a lot of the downtime on the set riding a bike for exercise and sitting quietly with Michael Brockman, a buddy from the racing world who had become something of a factotum and companion for him when he traveled. Newman didn’t joke around as he had on other shoots—his big gag was driving his rental car with a rubber chicken hanging out of the trunk. “He’s not particularly warm,” a crew member complained to a reporter. “Most of the time he kept to himself.”

But Field found him a sensitive and gracious colleague. The two were talking one day about nothing in particular when Newman patted the younger man on the knee and called him “Scott.” Hearing what he’d just said, he suddenly excused himself and walked away. Field turned to Brockman, who explained who Scott was and conjectured that Field reminded Newman of his son.

A few days later word got around that Field was needed on the set and would thus miss the first birthday of his baby girl, then his only child. Newman heard about it and invited Field to dinner at the house he was living in outside of Durango. “He cooked spaghetti and salad,” Field remembered, “the famous dishes, just like you’d expect. And he had some really nice wine, but when he offered me a drink I asked him for a beer, and he gave me a Budweiser, but he gave me a look, too, because he rode a bike all day just so he could have those beers, and he didn’t want to waste them on me.”

Another dinner guest that evening was Schultz, who engaged in a vigorous but polite political debate with Newman, Field recalled. “It was just the opposite of their characters: Newman was the liberal and Schultz is very right-wing, exactly different from what they were doing in the film.” Later still the company spent New Year’s Eve together, and Newman told Field that it was the first time he’d marked the turning of the calendar apart from Joanne since they were married. “He had tears in his eyes while he was telling me,” Field recalled.

P
ERHAPS IT
was homesickness that made him dither about whether to accept another film job almost immediately after
Fat Man.
This time he was to play another larger-than-life historical character, Earl Long, the licentious, rascalish, and unapologetically outlandish governor of Louisiana who fell from political grace in the late 1950s in part because of his very public romance with the stripper Blaze Starr. Ron Shelton had written the script years before, and now that he had directed a hit film, the comic-romance-with-baseball
Bull Durham
, he had a chance to make it.

Shelton had worked on his script with the real Blaze Starr, who was
still plying the ecdysiastic trade in Baltimore in her late fifties and who told him that she had always told Earl Long that he had Paul Newman’s eyes. He got the script to Newman, and Newman took instantly to the part: a populist rogue and master political manipulator who championed civil rights and didn’t care whose sensibilities he offended. He even appreciated the bawdy parts, such as Long explaining that he wore boots to bed with a lady so that he could “get traction” or Long and Starr eating watermelon during an explicit lovemaking scene. Indeed, simply as an inveterate teller of bad dirty jokes, Newman delighted in the opportunity to blurt out lines like “Ah got a weakness for tough-minded, iron-willed, independent women with big titties.”

But when it came down to it, Shelton recalled, Newman was uncomfortable with the idea of himself paired with a younger woman. “He had a daughter the same age as the Blaze character,” Shelton said, “and that made him uneasy.” So even though the Hollywood trade papers had announced that he would play the role, he backed out. There was talk of offering the part to Gene Hackman. And then, Newman remembered, “I just woke up one morning and said, ‘Screw it.’” He would make the film.

That, of course, left Shelton the problem of finding the right Blaze Starr. At one point, producer Dale Pollock claimed, the filmmakers had seen more than four hundred actresses for the part. With Newman attached, the pressure to get it right was heightened; rumors that Melanie Griffith or Nancy Travis would play the role bubbled up. In fact, recalled Shelton, neither was ever in the picture. “Those two were candidates,” he said, “but we met with everybody in the world. The studio said, ‘If you hold on to Paul, it doesn’t matter if Blaze is played by an unknown.’ So we had four or five candidates read with Paul. And one, who I won’t name, looked too much like his daughter, and he said, ‘I couldn’t do that.’” Eventually Shelton had Newman read with a virtually unknown actress named Lolita Davidovich, “and she just blew him away. She got in his face and was funny and brave and guileless, and when she left, he looked at me and said ‘What was that?!’”

The film, entitled
Blaze
, shot in Louisiana in the early months of 1989. Newman stayed in a home rented by the producers for him in
the French Quarter, visited some of the best restaurants and clubs in the city, and was presented with a dog, a local hunting breed called a Catahoula Cur, by well-wishers.

Shelton found Newman an admirable collaborator. He reveled in the extra time that the director allowed him to rehearse scenes. “He loved the process of preparing more than the commitment to doing a take and picking it,” Shelton said. “One time he said to me, ‘I could just rehearse for a year!’ And I said, ‘That’s great, Paul, but what do I tell the studio?” There was one thing he didn’t want to do, though—the final scene, in which Long lies dead in his coffin in the capital rotunda in Baton Rouge. “He hated that coffin,” Shelton remembered. “He was really upset about being in it. He didn’t like it at all. I told [cinematographer] Haskell Wexler, ‘We’re not gonna shoot any coverage on this. Just get him in and get him out.’”

It was the one balky moment on an otherwise wholly collegial project. “You don’t know how shitty they can get in this business,” Shelton told a visitor to the set. “Actors refuse to come out of their trailer for a scene because they haven’t been stroked fifteen times that morning. But this guy Newman—you don’t have to fuck around.” And Newman was happy to tell anyone who asked how much fun he had shooting his sex scene: “I gave back four days of salary for that scene,” he joked. “I gave back my per diem, too, my lunch money…We went through seven pairs of boots.”

But in fact he was lonely. Perhaps it was the food or the Cajun accents, but Newman found himself, once again, pining for Joanne, whom he had openly courted on a Bayou State film set three decades prior. Joanne was, in fact, enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College during that spring term—she’d been attending on and off for more than a decade, hoping to finish the college degree she’d abandoned in Louisiana in the early 1950s. And then she got a pleading phone call from her husband. “He asked me to join him because he missed me,” she remembered. “There’s no academic degree in the world that can compare in importance to the fact that the person you’ve loved for thirty-one years is missing you.” She put her educational plans on hold and went to join him on the film set.

A
ND AS
he realized that he was happier with Joanne around, he agreed to make a third film in less than a year, this time with her. Joanne had discovered the project some years earlier—a spare, episodic novel named
Mrs. Bridge
published in 1959 by the writer Evan Connell. It told in discrete chunks the life story of India Bridge, a genteel, quiet, and depressingly ordinary upper-middle-class Kansas City housewife who raised three unhappy children with her husband, Walter, a stern and taciturn lawyer. The novel was joined a decade later by a counterpiece,
Mr. Bridge
, which focused more closely on Walter but shared the original’s structure and resistance to overarching narrative. In the two books Connell told the story of his parents, himself, and his siblings in vivid, unsentimental, and precise fashion that played like a series of home movies or blackout tableaux. It was riveting.

In 1986, when she saw the glorious romance
A Room with a View
, Joanne met with its director, James Ivory, and his producing partner, Ismail Merchant, to explore the possibility of working together. She mentioned the
Bridge
novels, and they were able to acquire the option rights to them. Merchant and Ivory, as per their practice, gave the books to their longtime collaborator, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, to adapt into a single script. When she finished, the Newmans had a look and agreed to play the title roles in what was now being called
Mr. & Mrs. Bridge.

Newman, Merchant recalled, “said it was one of the best screenplays he ever read.” And indeed he responded not only to its depiction of a social and cultural milieu like the Shaker Heights of his youth but also to its strange, linear-but-nonlinear structure. “You could describe the story as being about absolutely nothing,” Newman said. “But it really is about absolutely everything… It is accomplished by splashing essences of scenes, telling a story with a head-on impression followed by a glancing impression, and in the end coming away with a whole painting. More than anything else, that way of making a film appealed to me.”